Whatever Friday

I'm not someone who rushes to the stores on Black Friday. I hate malls on a good day and bargain-mad crowds freak me out. Consequently, this is the day when I rather don't even leave the house. Perfect day for reading and sipping hot cocoa.

Fortunately for those of use suffering from chronic mob-aversion, nowadays you can shop in the safety and your privacy of your home, wearing pajamas and fuzzy slippers, and still not miss out on the deals. All Romance eBooks is having a HUGE sale. Two of my own books, Dead Man and the Restless Spirits and Dead in LA are FREE for the day.

Desert Wind

The Santa Ana winds are blowing today and the high temperatures are in the nineties. Times like this always make me think of Raymond Chandler.

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”

― Raymond Chandler, Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories

One of my novellas, Dead in L.A. features the Santa Anas. In the book they increase Leander's psychic abilities. 

I've lived here for well over the a decade, but the southern California weather still amazes me. It's full of hot winds, droughts, mud slides, earth quakes, and fires. Yes, all those things fall under weather here.

Vintage Monday: The Odd Ones

This is one of the more peculiar vintage photos I've discovered on Pinterest. That place is like quicksand for a visual hoarder like myself. It has a wonderfully clean interface, simple but easy to use search, and the option to both link and upload images. When you search one image leads to another till you've killed hours.

I've set up my own boards, covering subjects from food to street art, and I have them for my books too. Being rather visual, I tend to look up pictorial references for all sorts of stuff as I write, even if thing is question only appears for a few lines. Like the steampunk wristwatch that plays minor role in Spirit Sanguine. In the old days I kept the images in folders on my desktop, later in folders within Scrivener. Now I put them on Pinterest too, keeping the board private till the book's release day.

I have no idea how many readers actually look at the images I've put up to illustrate my stories. The Dead in L.A. board has a photo of the lookout spot in Griffith Park where Jon and Leander have a conversation, and the Dead in the Desert one has pictures of the library in the desert where Leander make an important discovery. They are both real places, even if the characters and events are fictional.

Now excuse me, I have important "research" to do.

Status Update

Dead Man and the Army of Frogs is off to my beloved beta readers, and I'm busy doing preproduction for my next book. So far I've written 1,800 words of plot outline and it's not even the detailed one. The story is a sort-of-mystery, as mine often are, and what I've figured out is that instead of what will happen in the narrative, the first outline should contain what happens everywhere, including stuff my protagonists are not privy to. Put it in different terms, this is a chronological, omniscient description of events. The next step is to distill it into a bullet point list of events from the POV if my narrator(s).

I like this phase—it's exciting, and a little scary, but mostly all potential. I haven't always done it, but now I find it exceptionally useful. For example, giving names to all my characters even before starting the outline helps me to flesh them out. This is also the time I start doing research. I'm very visual and tend to look for a pictorial reference for every little thing that appears in my story, even if it's for one line.

A chunk of the book is to take place in a two bedroom Craftsman house in Silver Lake, so I drove around there to scout, then spent an hour on Google searching for photos of Craftsman homes. I even downloaded and printed a floor plan—it'll help me to visualize the scenes.

I grabbed another floor plan too, even though the place will probably only appear in one scene. It's a bungalow belonging to Mme Layla, aka Layla Maurell. Yeah, she's Bran's mom from the Dead Man books. :) I like having supporting characters walking from one book to another. This time I'm also planning guest appearances by Detective Lipkin from Dead in L.A. and Sandy Baker from Hanging Loose. Well, that's the plan. You know never know what actually happens once you start writing.

Status Update

I've been editing Dead in the Desert (sequel to Dead in L.A.) for over a week, with short breaks for cover designs. My brain is fried, but I'm close to finishing. Of course, I'll have to immediately jump on editing a novelette.

My writing process has changed since I started. I penned Hanging Loose and Last Stop in a thorough, chapter-by-chapter way, so I was able to send them to my trusty beta-partner, Josephine Myles as I went. The problem with that method was that I write slowly and even halfway through the end seemed unreachably far away. During Last Stop I lost steam twice, and was in the danger of not finishing at all. I had to seriously rally to get back on track. And that book is only 55,000-words long.

So now I rush toward the finish line—as much as a turtle can rush. If something threatens to bog me down, I leave it for later. I write "naked dialogue" without tags or beats. Often times, instead of going into details, I give myself stage directions. If I notice word repetitions or other things that need fixing, I highlight them and move on. I leave notes to remind myself of things that might need research or checking details in previous books.

The end result is that I have two passes of edits before sending the MS out for beta. First, I go through the story and fill in all the wholes, do all the fine-tuning. Next, I compile the story into a mobi format and upload it onto my Kindle app. Then… I do nothing for a few days, because at the point I just need a damn break. When I finally get around reading the story, I highlight problem areas, take notes, and follow it up another round of edits.

Interestingly, in case of every story comes a point when I just hate the whole damn thing. That's when I know I'm almost done.

First Lines

Books on writing invariably will advise you to hook your readers from the very start. It's a good advice. The first version of my first novella—or short novel, depending on whom you ask—started with a chapter-long exposition. It was terrible. Fortunately, my beta reader told me so. The second version was marginally better, but only in the third did I manage to start with the action, instead of the backstory.

Now that I have few titles out and a few more in the pipelines I figured I'd make a compilation of first lines of my novels and novellas in chronological order, just for fun. Here they are:

I woke on a lumpy futon, tangled in my sheets and a dilemma: what was I to do for the next two days? (Hanging Loose)

It’s hard to talk with your mouth full of cock. (Academic Pursuits)

The first light of dawn slashed through the darkness, spilling the new day over the unsuspecting land. (Last Stop)

It's the randomness of things that scares me the most—not knowing what fate or blind chance have in store. (Dead in L.A.)

It was Gabe’s thirteenth straight perfect summer night in Chicago since he’d arrived back from Budapest. (Spirit Sanguine)

Dying sucked hairy monkey balls. (Dead Man and the Restless Spirits)

Karma cursed me because I called her a bitch. (Secrets and Ink)

The naked man came out of nowhere. (Werewolves of Venice Beach)

The last four are in various stages from soon-to-be-published (Spirit Sanguine) to the barely-started (Werewolves of Venice Beach). The latter aims to be a short story and that line might even change, but what the heck, right?

I'm thinking of making a similar list of my favorite books.

Wednesday Word: Collywobbles

collywobbles |ˈkälēˌwäbəlz|plural noun informal chiefly humorousstomach pain or queasiness : an attack of collywobbles.• intense anxiety or nervousness, esp. with such symptoms : such organizations give him the collywobbles.ORIGIN early 19th cent.: fanciful formation from colic and wobble .
This is one of those words that need to become more popular. I rarely have stomach problems--my anxiety manifests itself in shoulder and upper back pain. I had a lot of it while writing Dead In L.A. No colic, but a lot of emotional wobble. Instead of letting it cripple me, I decided to harness it and channel it into Jon, the narrator. It became the stuff of his fears, bitterness, and secret yearnings.

I Whine

I'm at Coffee And Porn In The Morning today, whining about the Southern California weather. It shows how spoiled  I am.

There will be a giveaway of Dead In L.A. on Friday.

Sunday Stuff

BAH! HUMBUG!

So the world didn't end. Again. What a surprise.  I could have predicted that. First of all the world won't end with rapture, fire and brimstone, and any other Hollywood pyrotechnics. It'll be with a slow whimper.

I'm a Grinch; the whole month of December is nothing but stress, cheesy supermarket music, and way too few daylight hours to me. I cope by batting down the hatches and trying to ignore the whole thing as much as possible.

The only decoration I have is this crocheted snowflake—a gift from Jo Myles. In lieu of tree, it hangs from my Dalek's plunger arm.

No wonder last years Christmas short—the one in Winter Warmers—ended up sort of melancholy. I was battling the flu and fleeing Mariachi music when I started writing it. No holiday short this year, although the second story in Dead in L.A. ends at Christmas time.  I was battling a wee bit of anxiety at the time of writing, and did my best to channel it into Jon's character. If you have it, use it. Am I right?

On the brighter side of things: winter solstice was on Friday, and from here on the days are getting longer.